New Sounds New Styles: Will it all be over by next week?

1981 ➤ As the cultists get their own
niche magazine, they are asked
to read its fortune

Mighty leap: After spring 1981’s pilot issue of NSNS, left, set out the origins of the New Romantic movement, the first monthly issue was launched in July with clubland reports from New York to Liverpool, fashion from Birmingham, and music from funk to Ze. Cover photograph of London Romantics Steve Strange and Perri Lister by Robyn Beeche; and right, Birmingham’s style leaders Martin Degville and Jane Farrimond by Paul Edmond

❚ IN MARCH 1981 the then-savvy magazine giant Emap published a 64-page pilot issue titled New Sounds New Styles, hard on the heels of The Face and i-D, two independently financed pathfinders in this yet unfamiliar post-teen market for magazines that discuss more than music alone. NSNS was designed to test the potential of the New Romantics fashion and clubbing scene in the very spring when it was taking off with explosive force. Britain’s style-conscious young suddenly found new clubnights opening by the week while chart music changed direction – away from middle-of-the-road rock and chart pop, towards newer dancefloor variations on funk and electro-pop.

Dozens of new bands were adopting outrageous images in their bid for fame so that after Duran Duran, champion of the Birmingham Romantics, had signed to EMI, they found their first single Planet Earth battling its way up the February charts, alongside rival newbies Spandau Ballet, Visage, Ultravox, Kim Wilde, Toyah, The Teardrop Explodes, Beggar & Co, The Look, not to mention five, yes, five singles by the old-school panto-punk Adam Ant, who remained defiantly outside the clubland fraternity.

The irony was that the clubbing pioneers who had generated a year’s worth of media clamour were now shaking off the dubious label of New Romantics even as Duran Duran wrote the phrase into the lyric of their debut single which finally reached No 12 that March.

So in order to persuade Emap to give the go-ahead to an official first issue of NSNS in July, its editor Kasper de Graaf asked movers and shakers one crucial question in that spring issue, as forecasts of race riots threatened the peace across Britain: Did this seemingly frivolous, if highly sociable, new youth movement have a future?

These were their forecasts…

Pop stars Gahan and Rhodes: broader appeal and a bursting bubble

“The whole thing is a big bubble that’s going to burst. It’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to come from this scene.” – Nick Rhodes, keyboardist co-founder of Duran Duran

☐ “As long as bands like ourselves don’t get tied in with the Futurist thing we’ll be all right. The clubs are going to get a lot bigger; now Spandau Ballet have broken the music for a broader public, tastes will slowly change – and that’s been needed for a long time.” – Dave Gahan, vocalist with Depeche Mode

“As a form of entertainment, clubs have taken over from gigs; groups are now making music for that sort of environment. What’s going on in London is a piece of pop culture rather than rock culture. When people don’t want to be associated with it in a cult sense, they’re saying that it is really a broad set of attitudes.” – Steve Dagger, Spandau Ballet manager

☐ “The press have tended to make it all sound quite lightweight and facile; they’ve underestimated the work that goes into starting a club or opening a shop. They’ve ignored the extent to which people are making their own entertainment and are genuinely making new things happen.” – Simon Withers, first designer of clothes and lighting for Spandau Ballet

“Steve (Strange)’s music is about making people dance: first they’re all thinking, Hey, we’ve got to dance like machines. Then it’s more like disco dancing, because the songs have gone funky. We want to keep them thinking, What is he going to do next?” – Rusty Egan, mould-breaking deejay and Strange’s club-partner from the Blitz and beyond

☐ “A few individuals will come out of it all who will be the best at what they do, the four or five best from their generation.” – Bob Elms, writer

“As a graphic designer and photographer, I see it as not just a music fad but as a whole cultural movement.” – Graham Smith, whose Spandau Ballet sleeves counted towards his first-class art-school degree

☐ “It’s got out of hand. You’re dealing with a group of people who will exist in four or five years’ time and would have done, whether the media got hold of them or not. I don’t care about fads in fashion. I’ve chosen my career as a designer and in ten years’ time we’ll look back and it’ll all seem very unimportant.” – Melissa Caplan, clothes designer for Toyah and Spandau Ballet

“People are beginning to appreciate that everyone has talent within them. That’s the best thing this movement is going to do, make people realise that talent.” – Paul Berrow, Duran Duran co-manager and co-owner of Birimingham’s Rum Runner nightclub

☐ “In 1980, sadly, pose became paramount. People were afraid to laugh or cry in case their make up cracked. Now in 1981 if you’ve got to get drunk, get drunk on funk.” – Perry Haines of trendspotting i-D magazine and Duran video stylist

“In some ways it *is* going to be all over next week; the people who want to keep it all as an exclusive Blitz type thing should realise that’s finished and all for the better. The spirit is the most important thing; people say about punk that the spirit died very early and the corpse staggered on, zombie like. Well, that spirit – the idea that everyone can think and act creatively – has been revived by these kids and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t set the standard for the next ten years.” – Richard Burgess, Landscape musician and Spandau Ballet producer

❚ AS HISTORY WOULD HAVE IT, NSNS itself ran for 13 issues before closing in July 1982, not long after the onetime Cult With No Name had been swept into the mainstream with the opening of such mega-clubs as Camden Palace in London, the Hacienda in Manchester, Rock City in Nottingham and the Academy, Bournemouth. By that stage the new pop was readying itself to conquer the world.

MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984

They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did

“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)

“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983

An “invaluable website” — historian Dominic Sandbrook, 2012

➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU AT TOP to go deeper into the past➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH, see the sidebar below➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s

RIP – STEVE STRANGE

◆ On Mi-soul radio on 13 Feb deejay Rusty Egan paid musical tribute to Steve Strange, his sidekick in founding the legendary Blitz Club, who died the day before: “Music says everything I could ever want to say” ... Catch up at Mixcloud

◆ During Feb 2015, Shapers of the 80s received more than 37,300 visits, its highest monthly total since launching five years ago. These came in response to our coverage of the death of Steve Strange. In the two weeks after we published tributes from Steve's friends among the former Blitz Kids, 25,000 views were counted. These have been record responses to any topic covered here

✱ Roxy Music: The Studio Albums vinyl box set out 16 March – brings together all eight of Roxy’s studio albums in a limited edition, for £149. All were mastered in 2014 for 180gm vinyl at half-speed at Abbey Road Studios. Each comes complete with original sleeve reproductions including artwork, lyrics and high-end gloss finishes

✱ With their tour silenced by Boy George’s lack of voice Culture Club have turned to crowd-funding to bring their album Tribes to market. £12.46 pre-orders extended to the end of March through PledgeMusic, a direct-to-fan music platform, and (with luck) it’ll be released in 2015 on the band’s own label, Different Man Music. As George told the Gender Benders TV show: “I haven’t had a record deal since 1995.”

✱ Always worth dipping into The World of Princess Julia, the blog by the former 80s Blitz Kid, now nightclub deejay, critic and style icon . . . Currently “running around” between runways sussing the latest fashion pointers”

FIONA ON ‘REAL’ THEATRE…

❏ The Blitz Kids outflanked most of the 80s copyists who followed their Bowie-inspired passion for changing their look as often as possible. You’d find the follow-on generation of posers at Studio 21 on Oxford Street or the Batcave, or in a back barrel at Birmingham’s Rum Runner. After the Blitz caravanserai had moved on into the world of work, fashion designer Fiona Dealey said: “You look at these little Bat people with make-up dribbling down their necks and you feel like saying, ‘Sorry darling, not enough loose powder’. The difference was that our make-up was stage slap, Leichner not Factor. The clothes came from a costumier, Charles Fox not Flip. Dressing for the Blitz was real theatre. It wasn’t just another uniform. You felt glamorous.”

Shapers of the 80s “invaluable”

◆ Shapersofthe80s is declared an “invaluable website” by historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of the rich new cultural analysis, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979. We report how Sandbrook gives generous credit to key influencers on youth culture. His unstuffy combination of high and low life energised the BBC2 series The Seventies aired in 2012

◆ Elsewhere at Shapers of the 80s, telly don Simon Schama succinctly expresses why we should document the “irreverent freedom” that is a special aspect of life in Britain

Sade in a nutshell ♫ ♫

✱ After 2010’s Grammy Award winning Soldier Of Love LP, Sade went on to release The Ultimate Collection. The 29 tracks on two CDs included three new numbers, plus a version of Moon & The Sky featuring Jay-Z . . . In 2011 the band won a Grammy award for Best R&B Performance By A Group for the track Soldier Of Love

SPANDAU 30 YEARS ON

◆ Tony Hadley at Facebook: “My wife and I are pleased to announce the safe arrival of our beautiful baby daughter born on February 6, 2012” ... But for Spandau, Tony dropped another bombshell on ITV’s Loose Women on May 16

Archive — Many publication dates are arbitrary, so click and take pot luck!

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